


Clockwork

by rachelisnotcool



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-19
Updated: 2014-09-19
Packaged: 2018-02-18 00:53:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2329262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelisnotcool/pseuds/rachelisnotcool
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While Cosima is getting better, Delphine thinks about clocks. Oneshot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clockwork

**Author's Note:**

> Mentions of disease/death, but nothing graphic. This isn't a happy story. I'll write one eventually.

Delphine has always loved clockwork. The way the gears clicked and slid into place, always at the same time, always in the same way. Clocks were dependable. Static in their dynamics. Changing enough to be interesting, but never dangerous. Never changing in ways you couldn’t predict. Clocks were patterns and logic and numbers. Delphine understood those.

  
What she couldn’t understand was people. People weren’t clockwork. People weren’t well-oiled gears and pre-programmed information, smooth and impersonal. They were sharp, bright explosions that made you see spots in front of your eyes and made the back of your head ache. People were the quiet hissing of a kettle. They were the birds quietly singing in the morning and crows crooning at night. They didn’t come in cycles, or in numbers, or in patterns. They were programmed, she knew, but it was a program she couldn’t crack.

  
Cosima had never been a clock, Delphine reflects, but Delphine had believed she was. Delphine's Cosima had been gears spinning swiftly, perfect in their imperfection. This Cosima is rusted and broken, and she couldn’t just clear off the rust and oil the gears and have her working again. Cosima is drowning, she knows, with perfect clarity. Cosima’s gears are waterlogged and confused and messy, and Cosima doesn’t know who Cosima is anymore.

  
Cosima was dying, and now she’s not. Cosima is getting better. That’s what everyone says, so it must be true; that’s what she tells Sarah over the phone, choking on the words. Sarah thinks she’s crying because she’s relieved. Delphine wonders if Cosima is relieved, or if Cosima is so far gone that she still thinks she’s dying.

  
Time is supposed to heal all wounds, and it does, a little. Time lets the scar tissue settle, but scars jut out, sharp and hard on Cosima’s soft skin, and neither of them can ever forget they’re there.

  
Cosima snaps at her during the day, and shakes during the night, because Cosima can’t wash it off of her, can’t wash the death off her hands no matter how much she tries, can’t stop the mortality that follows her everywhere she goes, and she knows Delphine can feel it too, whenever she touches her. So she doesn’t. Delphine is too beautiful for death and weakness, she thinks. Delphine is grace and beauty and life and lies, but _always for you, Cosima. Did it for you, Cosima. Cosima, je t’aime_.

For that, Cosima envies Delphine. Cosima can’t hide in lies. There’s no lying to death; it’s coming for you and you’re speeding towards it, and you’re going to crash in the middle, the kind of crash that shakes your brain and rattles your airway against your spine. Cosima wonders if there are casualties in crashes with death. Delphine wonders if Cosima can even hear her. And so they go to sleep, holding each other but miles away, lost in trains and clocks and broken machinery.

When Delphine wakes up in the night, she stares at the clock. It’s cold and bare and methodical, and Delphine wonders if she likes that better.


End file.
